“I had sexually assaulted 100 children before killing them,” read the first placard. “All the details of the murders are contained in the diary and the 32-page notebook that have been placed in the room and had also been sent to the authorities. This is my confessional statement.”

By the time reporters from the Urdu-language daily newspaper received Javed’s grisly confession, a copy of it had already been delivered to the police. But in what social commentators in Pakistan have called a stinging indictment of the nation’s antiquated public safety system, a system that has changed little since it was adopted nearly a century ago from the departing British colonialists, the letter was simply discarded.

In fact, according to published accounts, it was only after police learned that the media were on their way to Javed’s house that the crumpled confession was retrieved from a wastepaper basket and police were dispatched to the scene.

Reporters were already there, stunned into silence by what  they found. There were bloodstains on the walls and floor. Some were bloody handprints. There was the chain. And there were pictures, scores of them, a gallery of victims, some as young as 9, their photos snapped moments before their deaths. In one corner, five plastic bags contained shoes, 85 pairs of them, and children’s clothing.  There were tokens of impoverished childhoods cut horrifically short. Ijaz’ white shirt was in one of the bags. So was his ankle bracelet.

Javed Iqbal after surrender to police (Dawn)

As if the house had been turned into a museum to Javed’s savagery, signs were neatly tacked to the wall near each item. Near the foaming vat of acid that contained the bobbing remains of Ijaz and the other boy was one card – written, experts would later confirm, in Javed’s hand -- that read: “The bodies in the house have deliberately not been disposed of so that authorities will find them.”

It was unimaginable that such a crime could have occurred, authorities told reporters. How was it possible that so many children could have died so horribly without anyone even suspecting? In fact, of the 100 children who had vanished in the five months since Javed’s killing spree had begun, only 25 had been reported missing. Such is life in Pakistan, commentators later opined. Children vanish here and no one trusts the police to help. As the mother of one young victim told Time Magazine in a December 27, 1999 interview, “it never even occurred to me to go to the police for help.”

In a column that appeared in Dawn on October 14, 2001, Irfan Husain put it this way: “the reason so many parents did not report their sons missing is that they were afraid of having anything to do with the police.

“Indeed,” he wrote, “the…vast majority who are forced to come in contact with our cops, nine times out of ten, they are shaken down even when reporting a crime.”

In fact, Husain argued, the only thing that brought Javed’s killing spree to an end was Javed himself. “The murderer reached the target he had set for himself and wrote to the police and a newspaper.

“Had Javed Iqbal decided he would kill five hundred children, I have little doubt that he would still be at his gruesome task, unhindered by the minions of the law.”